Patty Griffin interview: 'I'm glad my voice is too sad for adverts'

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Patty Griffin has a vivid memory of a hope she had as a waitress in her twenties in Boston, before she had made the leap to become a full-time musician. The singer-songwriter, who was born in Maine on March 16, 1964, says: “When I was wiping down the tables, I always dreamed about travel. I would get to the end of a night shift and wonder what it was like in wonderful places around the world. I have been to a lot of them now and that has been great. But I’m just happy that I can sustain a living doing something I love. Music doesn’t have to be fancy. I work hard and enjoy the fact that people want to come to my shows. That’s simple, but I’m pretty blue-collar about it.”

In 2010, her album Downtown Church won the Grammy for Best Traditional Gospel Album. Willie Nelsondescribed the former Americana Music Association Artist of the Year as having “one of the best voices around”, and Griffin’s compositions have been recorded by Bette Midler, the Dixie Chicks, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris and Solomon Burke, among others.

Her 2013 album, American Kid, is dedicated to her father Lawrence Joseph Griffin, who died in 2009. Was it a difficult album to make? “It was very clear that my father was leaving the world,” Griffin says, “and I was very anxious about that. What I do in that situation is to write songs, because writing music makes me feel better, and singing makes me feel better, so I sat to write the way I felt and it ended up that a lot of the album was about him.”

Patty Griffin photographed during a visit to the Telegraph offices in 2013Credit:
Telegraph/Andrew Crowley

The track Irish Boy is celebratory and mournful, as she writes about a high-school physics teacher she describes as “such a scrappy guy”. She explains: “He had the Irish fighter thing in him, although a lot of people knew him as this gentle, generous and very kind person, which he was. He grew up in Boston at a time when the Irish were considered lower-class citizens, and I think that really had an effect on him.”

Griffin is the youngest of seven children (all born within seven years) and although her mother, of French-Canadian descent, had her hands full, she loved music. Griffin remembers a voice so amazing that on one occasion, she wasn’t sure if she was hearing her mother singing or the tones of a Peggy Lee record. Her own voice is remarkably rich and expressive. And it is achingly sad.

Is it true that she was rejected for advertisements because her voice was judged to be too mournful? Griffin laughs as she admits: “Yes, I was rejected for couple of adverts for sounding too sad. One was for Diet Coke, but it’s a good thing it didn’t happen because it probably would have been a big blight on my soul. It also happened with a fabric softener called Downy, and I guess the way I sang ‘Only Downy’ made people weep. They said: ‘We don’t want people to cry about fabric softeners.’ “I don’t fight my ability to sing sad songs: it’s what I am good at, so I must be built for that. But it's not essential to sing sad songs . . . you should always give some sugar with the medicine."

Patty Griffin in 2006Credit:
Getty Images

The oldest song on the album is Not a Bad Man, which is about a traumatised young soldier. What prompted her to write a song about a soldier? “There was a marine who had returned home from Iraq to Austin, Texas, where I live,” she says. “A lot of kids got lured in by the marketing campaign and joined up and they weren’t really sure who they were fighting. It was after 9/11 and the Twin Towers had come down and these boys were going to go to fight. For me, that was a very terrifying time to be in America and to be an American. Lots of our soldiers came home really damaged after they realised they were harming people they didn't know.

“I read a story in a paper about a family who were trying to get a young family member out of the military and get him some mental health care. That didn’t prove possible and he ended up dead and it wasn’t clear whether it was a suicide. So I wrote the song to get inside that kid, if I could.”

Despite her success as a lead singer, Griffin says she enjoys duet work. “I always wanted to be a back-up singer and my whole life I have been impressed by them. When I was a child, I loved watching the back-up singers to see how they were moving. I learned a lot from hanging out with Emmylou Harris. One of the biggest pointers she gave me was that if you don’t know the words, drop the consonants: that way you’ll hide the sound.”

At the moment her singing partner is Robert Plant, 64, the former Led Zeppelin singer she met when she joined his Band of Joy in 2010 after the Grammy success of her gospel album. Griffin believes they have a simple reason for gelling musically, as she puts it: “It’s like two lead singers who sing from the same emotional place. I recognise something in the way Robert goes for things that I feel myself. Two leads can be a very beautiful thing and on Ohio, for example, if you took my part out you would have another song. He’s very insecure about duetting and says he doesn’t know what he is doing – which is why it is great, of course.”

Patty Griffin and Robert Plant on the Jools Holland showCredit:
Rex Features

The pair gelled romantically, too, for a time and lived together in Texas. I wonder whether Plant, a fervent Wolverhampton Wanderers fan, had tried to get her interested in football? “Yes, I have been to a bunch of games – I have been to Blackburn and I have even tried Bovril!”

Griffin's creativity doesn’t seem tied to personal happiness. During her thirties – a period she describes as a “delayed adolescence” after working from the age of 18 and marrying and divorcing young – she wrote some heartbreakingly intense songs. She is still writing memorable songs in her Fifties.

Griffin says: “Having a sense of what is close to the bone can develop empathy and compassion in you and they are really important tools to have. Somehow, I don’t think I would have any of that without having grown up the way I grew up and done things like waiting on tables. These are important things to me, and in some of my work I am trying to say that you don’t get to have this forever, and just remember that this is a short period of time we’re here so you have to get it right.”